Learning Disabilities Mortality Review

Debate between Ivan Lewis and Caroline Dinenage

Tuesday 8th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Dinenage]

The CQC conducted an inquiry into this issue in 2016 and has a responsibility to check local healthcare provision to ensure it is up to speed. When local trusts start publishing their learning from deaths data from June, the CQC will be able to inspect them on how they bring the data forward and to judge them on that information.

[Mr Ivan Lewis (Bury South) (Ind)]

Societies and Governments should be judged by how they treat the most vulnerable. As well as avoidable deaths of people with learning disability, we have savage cuts to services across the country, so they have no constructive positive activities to participate in, and we have a complete dearth of employment opportunities now for people with learning disabilities. I started my working life 36 years ago working with people with learning disabilities, and we made tremendous progress over a 20-year period. It is a source of tremendous sadness that we have gone backwards in the last 10 years in the support that such people and their families are receiving. It is shameful. We need a cross-Government approach and we need action, not strategies.

[Caroline Dinenage]

It is sad that the hon. Gentleman has sought to politicise this issue. It is nothing to do with funding cuts or cost-saving measures. We have actually invested more money into this programme. We are the first Government in the world to publish a learning from deaths programme so that healthcare trusts are held accountable and have to publish their data on people who die unnecessarily in their care. Making short-sighted party political points is therefore very unfair and does not get to the heart of the issue, which is about supporting people with learning disabilities and making sure that their health outcomes are the same as those of the population as a whole.